We Built a Tool That Reads Privacy Policies

You have agreed to hundreds of privacy policies. You have probably read none of them. That is not laziness — it is arithmetic. A much-cited American study from 2008 worked out that actually reading every privacy policy an average person meets in a year would cost them around 76 working days. Nobody has 76 working days. So we scroll to the bottom, click the button, and move on.

The strange part is that none of this is hidden. The policy is right there at the foot of every page, free to read. It is public and it is impenetrable, and those two things together work better than secrecy would. You cannot object to a term you were never going to find.

Written to be agreed, not read

Open any large platform’s privacy policy and you will meet the same handful of devices. Length, first of all — ten thousand words is not unusual. Then the defined terms, capitalised and cross-referenced, so that one sentence cannot be understood without three others. Then the soft plural: your data may be shared with our partners, our affiliates, our service providers. Who are they? The policy rarely says.

Watch for the word “may” in particular. It does almost all the heavy lifting. “We may use your information to improve our services” is not a description of anything. It is permission, written in advance, for whatever turns out to be useful later. Every vague phrase is a door deliberately left unlocked.

This is not always deliberate — policies are written by lawyers for regulators, not for the person holding the phone. The effect on you is the same either way.

The eight things worth knowing

Strip away the structure and almost everything you would want to know falls into eight questions. What do they collect? Who do they share it with? Do you get a real choice, or is it take-it-or-leave-it? How long do they keep it? How much control do you have once they have it? How do they make money? How do they protect it? And where, legally, are they accountable?

Two carry more weight than people expect. How a company makes money is the tell — if the answer is advertising, most of the other answers follow. And where they are accountable decides what your rights are worth: a right you can only enforce in a foreign court is a right in name only.

The checker does the reading

So we built something that reads them for you. Type a service name, paste a URL, or paste the policy text itself, and the checker fetches the real document and grades it on those eight questions, one to five, with a short plain-English explanation for each and one overall score.

It is free, needs no account, and stores nothing about you — no email address, no IP address, no session. Results are kept for a while so looking up the same service twice is instant, but what is kept is the assessment of the policy, not any record of who asked.

What it cannot tell you

The checker is automated and unreviewed. That makes it different from other things on this site — every fix we recommend has been personally tested first. The scores here have not been. There is a disclaimer on every result saying exactly that.

It also judges the document, not the company. A policy is a promise, and a promise is not proof. A business can write an admirably clear policy and behave badly anyway. And where a service splits its terms across several pages, the checker may see only one of them and score what is in front of it.

Treat the result as a starting point, then. Not a verdict — a way to find out in a minute what would otherwise take an afternoon, so you can decide whether the afternoon is worth spending. The deciding is still yours. The difference is that now you get to do it with some idea of what you are agreeing to.

Try it for yourself

We are not the only people who have tried to solve this. The one other project we can genuinely point you to is Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, which takes a different route: real people read the terms, tag individual clauses as good or bad, and those tags add up to a grade from A to E. Its reasoning is open to inspection and a browser extension shows you a grade as you visit a site. Where it has an entry, it is worth more than any automated score — including ours. The gap it leaves is everything else, and that is the reason we built anything at all.

Photo: Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels